Chilton, for example, has suggested that a proper understanding of the cognitive capacities of humans may lead to the conclusion that CDA is trying to teach people what they already know. ‘Put bluntly, if people have a natural ability to treat verbal input critically, in what sense can CDA either reveal in discourse what people can…already detect for themselves or educate them to detect it for themselves?’ (Chilton, 2005a). Yet the closing sentences of Chilton (2004) note that ‘if people are indeed political animals…then they are also in principle capable of doing their own political critique. The important question is whether they are free to do so’. I agree. Chilton (2005a) argues that although there are various conditions under which people are not free, ‘it is doubtful that any of them can be elucidated by purely linguistic or discourse that any of them can be elucidated by purely linguistic or discourse-analytical means. For they would seem to have to do with economic forces or socio-political institutions’. The main problem with this argument is indicated by the contrast between ‘purely’ linguistic or discourse-analytical factors and economic forces or socio-political institution. From a dialectical-relational perspective, economic forces and sociopolitical institutions are in part semiotic, and analysis has in part semiotic analysis. The fact that people have cognitive capacities which make them in principle capable of seeing through manipulative intentions and even doing their own political critique (which CDA, far from discounting, presupposes) does not mean that they are generally capable in practice of seeing through the complex dialectical relations between semiotic and non-semiotic elements which constitute the social, political and economic conditions of their lives.